I sit down alone with myself and think over the things I should have done, the things I have done, the things I wish I hadn’t done, the things I want to do. I do this around this time every year, a cup of coffee in one hand, a pencil for doodling in the other. The doodling has nothing to do with memories, regrets, or hopes. It’s just something to do with my hands while I think. I’m not going to write all of my reflections here, because what I think is more important is the trend of the thing.
Category: PERSONAL
Two Letters I Can’t Write
Dear Psycho Who Lives Upstairs in Apartment 601, Please stop yelling at the woman you live with. You sound mentally ill, and it’s obviously not changing her mind anyway. Seriously, sometimes in the hall I hear your voice and without pause a straitjacket comes to mind. Please stop stomping around. It’s really, really annoying me. Please stop this habit of starting loud, nasty fights late at night. If you have to fight, do it in the daytime. Please stop being so damned psychotic. Get help. Surely you don’t think screaming, throwing things, and freaking out once a week, on Thursdays, …
More Sidebar Pics
I’ve added a bunch more sidebar pics to the mix; if you’re curious, hit reload a few times to see some of the new shots I’ve added. Some will be familiar to longtime readers, because they’re shots I originally used in my banners in the old format. Others are new. My favorite is the dragonfly pic — I think it and the hahoe mask shot (also in the mix) are perhaps the best pictures I’ve ever taken. How about you, Dear Reader? [No jape at any Korean dictators intended, but I don’t mind that it’s there.] Which sidebar pics do …
Merry Merry Merry
My Dad — newly returned from his jaunt to Africa — will be doing up a curry, I am guessing, tonight. My Mum will be around the house, probably playing with my nephew Nathaniel as Marie and Troy (Nathniel’s parents, my sister and brother-in-law) will sit on the couch and chat about what’s new these days. Annie — sorry, Isabella — will be relaxing, I hope, since she’s pregnant, and Martin will be happy to have her back from Africa. Or is he still in Nigeria? I have no idea, she didn’t mention in her email. Anyway, all I know …
A Nice Thing I Forgot To Report
Since I very often refuse to pull punches when the annoying things come up, I feel at least obligated to mention nice things when they do happen. One happened just yesterday. My very happy iAudio M3 purchase of October 2004 turned into this November’s annoyed jittering mess a few weeks ago, so Lime did me a favour and looked up the local service center. To my shock, there actually is a local service center. We went there on Monday afternoon. To my even bigger shock, the repair staff asked me whether I’d dropped the unit or not, without first telling …
Back To The Cutting Room
Well, it looks like the week before and the week after Christmas will be a little different than I imagined. I’ll have a fair amount of packing to do, I’ll probably need to find an apartment for March, and it looks like I’ll be in Canada for something like 2 weeks. Lime is going to be able to leave around Feb 1st and will need to be back by about Feb 18th. Since a person cannot pack, pack, pack all day, one of the things I plan on doing is some writing and revision. I’ll have basically two weeks before …
“I Haven’t Been Listening to Any Music Lately.”
That’s what my website claims, so it must be true. Actually, I have been, but on my poor, limping, half-functioning mp3 player, not on my computer. That’s why nothing is showing up on my audioscrobbler feed, and that’s why my website thinks that I haven’t been listening to anything at all. Ah well. But in fact, during all of my recent trips, I have been listening more to audio narration than to music. I’m enjoying Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture, which I’m listening to in free audiobook format. Lawrence Lessig rocks, and that’s just that. And you know, releasing his …
Snowburst
Today it’s been snowing like mad all day long, so I didn’t much feel like going out. After some movie-review blogging, I settled into study of Ezra Pound — I swear, for those interested, a big update is coming with all kinds of observations on the Cantos since last time: our group has finished A Draft of XXX Cantos and is now working on Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI. Somewhere in the middle of studying Pound, Lime came over and hung out, and after spending the later afternoon and evening here, I walked her to the bus stop; it was the …
The Strangest Dream
I just woke from the strangest dream. I was at a dinner party at which there were a large number of political refugees in attendance. It was a kind of international pot-luck dinner and though it was quite relaxed, not formal or stagged or anything, it seemed to me as if each person told his or her story to me (personally, individually) as I tried his or her home country’s food. To make things more interesting, all kinds of nonsensical border wars were mentioned, such as border wars between Lebanon and Afghanistan (the story, rather harrowing, was told by a …
The Crescendo
The best part of any symphonic work, in my opinion, is the big crescendo. That’s when every instrument is getting louder bit by bit, every part is getting slightly more complicated and powerful, and everything is weaving together into a Really Big Statement. Well, of course, these happen in life, too. (We would scarcely find them in music if they did not happen in life first.) These days, I’m riding the crest of a big crescendo, and thus far I’ve kept mainly ahead of it; sometimes just barely, but still ahead. Job interviews, final exams, impending camp, preparations for a …